A rare court victory

A convicted sex offender has won a High Court order for the removal of a Facebook page set up to monitor paedophiles in Northern Ireland. A judge ruled some content amounted to prima facie harassment of the man and risked infringing his human rights.

Time to break open the champagne? Sure, why not enjoy the moment, although this humane court decision is sure to provoke a whopping backlash, with predictable howls that it is an example of “human rights gone mad”. In fact I do predict it, and will eat my website if it fails to happen PDQ. Also, it looks as though the decision will be easy to get around, at least in the short term: already the offending page has been replaced by others with similar names.

While it is encouraging that a sex offender has at least been acknowledged as a human being with the same right as anyone else right to freedom from harassment, I am also a bit worried about the mushrooming phenomenon of legal action against freedom of expression online.

There has been a whole rash of arrests this month in the UK of people making tweets that do not harass anyone but are merely “offensive”. In one case a guy was collared by the police and ended up in a prison cell for tweeting a photo of a burning poppy. Apparently, this was taken as an insult to the nation’s war dead, who are commemorated each year in a Remembrance Day that features poppies, which symbolise “the fallen”.

If giving offence online is enough to get you arrested, I guess Heretic TOC cannot expect to be at liberty for long.

Offline, meanwhile, the Leveson inquiry reported in the UK this week with a damning indictment of numerous press misdeeds including harassing the relatives of a murder victim. Leveson is right to insist the press should conduct its business in a civilized way and that this should be overseen by an independent body. This need not entail the threat of state censorship as the scare-mongering press have loudly bruited.

The biggest threat to press freedom in Britain and elsewhere is the near monopoly of the media by a tiny number of overmighty media barons, especially the appalling Rupert Murdoch: this stranglehold enables the opinions of that one man to crowd out those of nearly all others. The result is not democracy but Murdochracy.

It would be good to give more publicity to such ‘court victories’, mostly to counter the impression that they are rare when they are not.

Some of the pro-paedophile lobbyists also need to stop being victims, arguing that everybody is against them when due process in law is by far the dominant outcome.

In terms of the Internet, we have long pursued a management strategy of having police close down certain sites while allowing other sites to remain, while at the same time setting up our own counter sites.

The reason is to allow browsers to see for themselves who are the brainless slavering ranters, and who has something sensible to say. If anything does occasionally come up we simply provide them with links and invite them to make up their own mind.

I have been saying this for years, that the pro-paedophile case creates own problems in the way it present themselves to the public media. It’s not victimisation simply bad image management.

Tom, you’re a journalist. All this is familiar to you. We all need to be pulling in a coherent direction in this, and act positively.

This I want to take to task:
“I have been saying this for years, that the pro-paedophile case creates own problems in the way it present themselves to the public media. It’s not victimisation simply bad image management.”

Hmmm. Well, if you don’t know about how the media pros manipulate and utilize their own brand of “managing” the image, and you have been like so many conventionally-challenged activists, you don’t see the victimization coming (or, at least not that LEVEL of victimization!).

If you’ve only studied the ideals of media (i.e. liberal or conservative privilege), but not the realities (for those kicked out of privilege and so on), then it’s very easy to be taken off guard, and be rendered speechless. But then, of course, if the media is pre-taped, and not live, the managing media makes sure to edit it into the worst possible hack job possible. Time and again, we see this (tho I admit, I don’t know what’s happening these days, except we don’t see any pro-BL or GL on the media).

I recall Dr.Fritz Bernard (author, activist) being rendered suchly when he dared to go onto u.s. tv, with albeit, another activist who should’ve known better.

But they (activists) haven’t and don’t. It must be something along the lines of the pacifism approach, as to why they don’t seem to learn anything about media reality BEFORE they go on such programs. I recall one NAMBLA activists’ response to being on CNN, Larry King, and etc. He was overwhelmed. He didn’t know what to do.

The activist crowd didn’t push for practice amongst each other (say, via organized group assistance in some capacity), no, they merely pushed that everyone try to get ONE idea across. And then, seem to go along with getting trampled.

That didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to do everything possible. But they had their way (as most of the Western groups seem to have been stuck), and that was it. No “wild eyed radicals” wanted!

So, yeah, I don’t agree that it’s not victimization. It is victimization we face in the West, in the same way that Indigenous peoples the world over are victimized by all manner of neo-colonial “interest” to get their land and resources.

Bring in the slick PR people, but then you see that the game doesn’t work that way. If it did, I think many would have tried it. But those doors don’t open for “just anyone”!

[TOC: Over 400 words again, 2nd time today. I acknowledge the importance of this topic but the above could be expressed much more briefly. Arbitrary cut-offs may become necessary, as I regret I don’t have time to moderate lots of long posts. Sorry!]

I can only see the oppression being this prevailing Anglophone monolingual monocultural monotony per se; this ‘right to speak’ mantra with it’s grab words from anywhere style producing endless drivel rather than any domination by an articulate ‘elite’.

Having spent years seeking to help people understand how to say something, the sheer extent of their bitter resistence to stringing together a coherent and well-constructed sentence by those claiming their right to be heard no longer astonishes me.

The issue appears to me that they do not want to find their own voice, only to have someone else they perceive to be in power speak for them, against somebody else they think they hate.

The question is, why seek out a politician or a tabloid journalist for this task? Why not get an erudite scholar to write something for you, or better, teach you to speak and to write? It’s not that hard, and there are plenty of us about.

These days it is no longer a conversation but a crude power game, activist groups forming not around well-formed ideas but common slang expressions mobilised to batter the perceived enemy until nothing makes sense at all.

Feelings are good. Feelings are wonderful. People should all get in touch with their feelings – the ’60s hippies were *right*!

But let’s not get carried away with this… people can get their feelings hurt – that’s one thing (and the vast majority of normal people “get over it” – feelings are almost never truly “traumatic” – feelings fade, we forget… it’s *supposed* to be that way!)

But to put the power and force of “the Law” behind “protecting people who (might) get their feelings hurt” is going too far.

Well, not really, not from the POV of the government. It’s the perfect way to control people! After all, all of our behavior/actions/decisions/etc. are controlled by “the gut”.

“Aren’t pedophiles disgusting!”

Disgust. The limbic system at work. The reptilian part of the brain.

When it comes to how we deal with most things in life, we’re all just lizards!

Too bad we haven’t (or can’t?) grow up. The “lizard within us” can be a hateful, vicious, destructive creature…

So many of us find so, so many things “disgusting”… Like, sex, for example…
😦

But deliberate harassment of others should not be permitted – not by anybody, not even if it is directed against “disgusting pedophiles”.

Because, when all is said and done, one man’s “disgust” may be another man’s “gusto”. There’s no explaining taste…